Post #8596

‘Tis the season for summer holiday, and we are operating with a skeleton crew this week.

Mark, Denise, Joe, Andy and Neil are all enjoying some well-deserved holiday. Matt is sorting a house move. Jack isn’t on holiday, but he isn’t here either due to the fact that he is Stateside for Chaco purposes. We’re wishing him “Happy birthday!” from afar today.

Which leaves the other seven of us plus the delightful contractors (namely Charlie, Saar and our long-term buddies Fraser and Phil W) who are gracing us with their presence these days.

Nick, Charlie, Saar and Alex all have a hand in Sinawava this week. At the moment, it seems to be a lot of iPhone and Bluetooth and getting graphics to work right. We had a lovely message of appreciation from the client on that project at the end of last week, and the recognition of the incredible work that our crew has been doing was gratifying, to say the least.

Alice, Alex, Adam, Phil G, Phil W and Nick are doing their regular superb work on various bits of BERG Cloud and Little Printer. Phil W is revising screens on the dev board in order to provide physical things with their own BERG Cloud address. Alice is working on messaging and developer relations and doing some general needed maintenance on the site. Adam is keeping an eye on everything as more Little Printers come online to make sure that nothing falls over. Nick is implementing updates to make it possible for Little Printer to upload as much data as it downloads. Alex is doing some design around messaging and is helping with a bit of ad hoc packaging design. He’s also been playing a bit with a brand new A1 printer that was just randomly given to us. (Right place at the right time, that.)

More Little Printers arriving in people’s homes means lots more questions about what Little Printer can and can’t do and why it’s not doing what its owner expected it to do. Sometimes that’s because of misplaced expectations. Sometimes it’s a matter of wishful thinking and we agree that yes, it would be great if Little Printer could do that and it may well be able to do that someday, but in the meantime, look at the awesome things it does RIGHT NOW! And every now and then it’s because there’s actually a technical glitch (often to do with connecting to the owner’s internet router) and we do the best we can remotely to troubleshoot and try to get the Little Printer and his/her owner humming along together as quickly as possible. That’s what Fraser and I have mostly been doing. Fraser is also busily keeping the BERG Cloud blog updated with fresh content. (That’s me practicing lingo for my next career as a social media consultant. Seriously, though, it’s good. You should read that blog too.)

Last but most definitely not least, Helen is heroically defending us from suppliers whose customer service – to put it mildly – leaves something to be desired. At least we’re learning a good lesson in what not to do when you’re providing customer service. She’s also doing her usual bang-up job of making sure that all the pounds and pence are accounted for and slotted in exactly where they should go.

We’re having the first proper grey, rainy day that we’ve had in weeks, but in lieu of sunshine, we all had free cake. Which was nice.

I think that’s it from our little corner of Shoreditch. Have a good week wherever you are!